Having appeared on last year’s University Challenge final, last week I received a couple of messages on Twitter from a Daily Mail reporter, asking if I would comment on the lack of women there this year – since Balliol College, Oxford and Wolfson College, Cambridge both fielded all-male teams. Not wanting to speak to the Mail, I ignored the messages, and thought no more of them.
Unbeknown to me, members of the Balliol team had also been contacted by the same journalist – although without mention that they would be interviewed for an article on female under-representation. Their response was to issue a thrillingly polite takedown of the newspaper’s “long record of hateful comments about women, minorities and marginalised groups”. History student Freddie Potts was first to reply: “Hi Laura – I have nothing against you personally, but equally I have nothing to say to the fascist rag that employs you.” Astrophysics DPhil Benjamin Pope clarified the team’s press policy: “Hi! As a team, we won’t be interviewed by the Mail. We know it’s not your fault, but we must ethically boycott that hateful publication.”
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